Joko is a cashback app: its users earn cashback when shopping in select shops or through online offers. Joko takes a cut the savings, it's a win-win.
I was contacted by Joko in 2019 to be their first full-time product designer. Even though I wasn't looking for a new challenge, I love the product and the team - so I offered to give a hand until at night and weekends for a few months.
At this time, Joko had 100 000 users and had raised around 1 million euros. The app was simple, and loved by their users with 4.9/5 rating on the app store.
The business goal was to drive growth by making it easier for user to find great offers.
I did a bunch of calls with different types of Joko users to better understand how they were using it, what was working well, what was frustrating, and uncover opportunities.
I changed the app's navigation to be more in line with the users jobs of finding the best offers:
• Removed all notifications from the home feed and moved then to a dedicated "Notifications" tab
• The "Home" and "Search" was have been merged into a single "Offers" tab, focused on Joko's core job of helping finding great offers
The moment a user open the Joko app and discovers the cashback they collected clearly was the high of the user journey. I decided to double down there and over-invest in delight to create a memorable experience, through a rewarding animation and haptics.
During my research, it seemed pretty clear that all users were enjoying looking for the best offers, but that Joko wasn't designed with that in mind (it was adding a single new offer every day to the home list).
I convinced the team to perform two key changes that are still present today:
• Editorialization: make sense out of the 1000s of offers by introducing different kind of categories - some static, some
• Encourage browsing: make is simple and enjoyable for users to explore Joko and find the best offer for them
I built a simple and flexible design system for Joko that would allow the team to easily continue iterating on it after my mission.
Joko now has +1 million users and has raised +10M euros to become Europe's shopping super app. Many new features have been added, but the core principles defined above remain.
